The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (42 page)

“You’ve got to hand it to whatever fairy it was that gave him that nickname he always introduces himself with,” piped up Tiki Tiki, “because it fits him like a glove. Imagine me, with this Biscayne Bay of mine, he filled me up
completely,
and at least for a few hours poured oil on my erotic waters.”

“Ay! what can I tell you?” exclaimed Hiram, La Reine des Araignées, throwing her arms open. “Why, only last night the Key to the Gulf showed me heaven on Monte Barreto!”

And the queen, swishing, hands and feet aflutter, gave a leap of pleasure up onto the rocks and began to describe in full detail the divine young man’s phallic prowess.

“I can assure you,” said Mayra the Mare as Delfín continued with his skipping about, “that if that boy would promise to screw me even once a month, I’d give up my husband and my eleven children and follow him to the ends of the earth.”

Suddenly Skunk in a Funk realized that from the moment he’d met him (about three months ago), his lover had slept with almost every fairy and every queen in Havana—and almost all the women, too, including even Clara Mortera, who’d already painted his portrait—and that on top of that, he was now recognized as Número Uno among all the hustlers in El Vedado and acclaimed as the Prize Bugger of Arroyo Arenas, a title aspired to by the most famous buggers in the country. The beautiful adolescent introduced himself to all his conquests, and to all those who
aspired
to be conquered (which meant almost every inhabitant of the Island), by the nickname Key to the Gulf, the name that Skunk in a Funk had so lovingly bestowed upon him.

Although almost all the guests who filled the immense catacomb of the Fifingian Palace were unquestionably “originals”—Selecto Macumerco and Papayi Taloka come immediately to mind—about whom any number of fascinating volumes might easily have been written, there was one whose fame was so widespread and whose importance was so great that it is simply impossible for us to allow her to pass in review before Fifo without first a few brief observations.

Her name, first of all, was The Electric Venus.

The Electric Venus was an Italian queen into whose backside the Oslo Academy of Science had implanted high-voltage wires that the fairy was able to control with a locket that she wore around her neck, dangling between her silicon breasts. When someone was having his way with the queen and she wanted (or had orders) to kill him, all she had to do was turn up the voltage. Instantly, the backside-stuffer would be electrocuted.

The Electric Venus specialized in assassinating the world’s political leaders. On her impressive
curriculum vitae
appeared the names of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Mae Pse-tung, Leon Trosvki, Breshnev, the dictator of the Filippines, Marshall Tito, Ché Guevara, Aristotle Onassis, Olaf Palmer, Martin Luther King, both kings of Egypt, Golda Meir (who everyone knows was a man), John F. Kennedy, and some fifteen other constitutional presidents and several secretaries-general of the United Nations. . . . Radiant, the Electric Venus greeted Fifo (who surreptitiously gave her a few affectionate pats on the rear) and made her way into the circle of the world’s most prominent heads of state.

A truly regal queen dressed head to toe in linen and lace and shod in a gloriously clunky pair of platforms (tailor-made for her by Mahoma) swept in through the magnificent doors of the García Lorca Theater, which had recently been declared a national monument and moved intact to Fifo’s palace. Another fairy, dressed in an impeccable smoking jacket made out of polyethylene bags (and also wearing platforms by Mahoma), made an entrance through the doors. Ten fairies, each dressed in a
smashing
ensemble and wearing brightly polished earrings, crushed through the door of the García Lorca Theater and with their noses preceding them entered the lobby. A thousand fairies, wearing the most
striking
costumes imaginable (all designed by the peerless Clara Mortera), poured swiftly into the García Lorca Theater. An extraordinary event was about to take place in this grand hall tucked inside the very palace in which Fifo’s Grand Fiesta was being held. Halisia was dancing tonight!

“What do you mean
dance,
you brazen hussy! Why on earth would you tell people, you Communist faggot, that Halisia, who’s eighty years old if she’s a day, was going to dance? I mean, really! I’ve been watching you work for quite some time now, and I haven’t interrupted you because what you say is more or less right, even if every once in a while you throw in one of those snide remarks of yours or drip a little venom. But now to come along and say that
Halisia was going to dance,
when the last time I saw her she was in a wheelchair and could only take a few steps on a pair of crutches. . . . Dance! You try to tell
me,
Daniel Sakuntala la Mala (uh-huh,
la Mala
because I always tell the truth), that Halisia was going to
dance
—that’s really going too far. . . .”

Oh, my lord, will this faggot never let me write my novel in peace? What dreadful fate is mine—to have this fairy on my back day and night, supervising me, tromping all over every word I write. Because she doesn’t miss a word or a chance to tromp on it. Of course since she’s never written a thing and I’m recognized as a
marvelous
writer, she’s sick with envy, which is why she’s always interrupting me, trying to rattle me and make me lose my inspiration, especially when everybody knows I might kick the bucket any minute. . . . Well, you’d better listen to me, Miss Thing, I’m not going to lose my inspiration or anything else, because I’m of perfectly sound mind and furthermore, everything I say is the truth. Yes—
Halisia was going to dance,
whether you like it or not, and if you’d let me finish what I was saying you might find out
why
that eighty-one-year-old witch (not eighty) was still able to dance. So hush, and just listen for once.

In this city there lives the most horrid of all fairies.

“Coco Salas!”

That’s right, Coco Salas. All right, then—What is the mystery behind that fairy? Where does he get the wherewithal to live the way he lives? How can such an
ugly
queen get her hands on so many nice things—all those fabrics and jewelry and trinkets . . . ?

“I’ve always wondered about that myself. The number of frocks that queen can put on. . . . But since everybody says that she’s in State Security. . . .”

Oh, child, don’t be silly.
Everybody’s
in State Security, even the political prisoners, and nobody else dresses in French silks or has a house full of Bulgarian roses or wears luminescent belts the way Coco Salas does. And all those things, my dear, are gifts, gifts from her intimate friend Halisia Jalonzo. Now then, knowing—as we all do—who Halisia is, think: Is that witch a friend of anybody? Has she not destroyed even the people who thought they were her closest friends? Has she not gotten rid of all the ballerinas with any talent so that she could always be the star? So—a person so monstrously perverse—does it make any sense for that person to be a friend of Coco Salas’? No way. What, then, is Coco Salas’ secret? Well I’m going to tell you, you none-too-intelligent queer: It is through the offices of Coco Salas that Halisia Jalonzo dances.

“I can’t believe it. I mean I’m speechless. On top of the fact that you won’t just die of AIDS and get it over with, now we’re going to have to take you to the mental ward.”

Hush, you silly bitch, and listen. Listen to the secret of Coco Salas that only I am privy to, because I am a great observer. As you know, for many years now all Halisia has been doing is tripping all over herself on the stage, falling on her head, and smashing that big beaky nose of hers into the wall. Famous for its hilarity is the true story of the time she danced with her back to the audience and when she started to take her bows she fell on top of the conductor down in the pit and killed him. People would go to the ballet just to count the times that Halisia fell down. But five years ago, at the International Ballet Festival they hold every year in the water amphitheater in Lenin Park, Halisia, on that floating stage, surprised the world by executing a grand jeté and then doing forty-four consecutive pirouettes. The entire amphitheater broke into cheers, although no one could fathom how that old bag could suddenly have brought back her old dancing from the dead. But Coco Salas, who was in the first row with a huge pair of opera glasses, saw the cause of the octogenarian’s leaps and turns. A ferocious mosquito, one of those that are spawned only in the reservoir in Lenin Park, was biting Halisia on the thighs. The old woman, feeling those stings, hadn’t been able to control herself, so she
leaped
. The ballet was a success and Halisia won the Silver Slipper International Prize for Dance. The next day Coco Salas showed up in her dressing room with a cardboard box.

“
Who,
” Halisia asked him imperiously, “
are you?
” And she looked him up and down through her immense
pince-nez.
“And how dare you enter my private dressing room! Only Fifo is allowed that honor. . . .”

Coco’s only reply was to pull back one corner of his cardboard box and let a mosquito out. The mosquito flew straight for one of Halisia’s naked legs, bit it, and the ballerina gave a leap so high she almost hit the roof of the theater.

“You’re hired,” said Halisia, daubing rubbing alcohol on the bite. “Get a good supply of mosquitoes. I’m dancing tomorrow and I don’t want to disappoint my fans.”

“Leave it to me,” said Coco. And that very night he went to Lenin Park and for hours hunted down the fiercest mosquitoes. The next day Halisia came on stage looking radiant and began to dance the first act of
Swan Lake.
From behind the curtains, Coco Salas turned loose his mosquitoes one by one. Halisia danced
Swan Lake
as she hadn’t danced it in sixty years. There was no ballet critic in the world—they’d all been invited to this event—who failed to sing the praises of Halisia Jalonzo. Under mosquito attack, Halisia danced in Rome, Monte Carlo, Moscow, Madrid (where Coco Salas herself wrote an article entitled “The Privilege of Seeing Halisia Jalonzo Dance”), Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Algiers, New York, and, not to put too fine a point on it, all over the world. Coco, his box of mosquitoes always at the ready, restored her fame, and therefore her life. And that is his great secret: Halisia Jalonzo is still alive, professionally and literally, thanks to Coco Salas. It should come as no surprise, then, that Coco dresses the way she does, and that she enjoys absolute impunity. She’s Halisia’s fair-haired boy. (Get it now, Mary?)

And now, in the theater set inside the gigantic catacombs of the Fiferonian Palace, Halisia was dancing the second act of
Giselle,
and dancing it magnificently. Knowing that Fifo was in the theater with all his important guests, Coco tripled the number of mosquitoes that he freed. The audience sat spellbound at Halisia’s performance. Even the Argentine cows were entranced. A tear fell from the eye of the Hangman of Iran. María Tosca Almendros’ eyes—and this really
does
say a lot—grew teary. Fifo, sitting very near the Key to the Gulf, was doubly moved, first by the dance and then by the glow of success that this performance lent his celebration. Who would now dare deny that he was the world’s greatest patron of the arts and that the world’s prima ballerina was one of his most faithful subjects? Came the climactic moment, and Halisia, accompanied by a monumental orchestra and in the midst of a hushed silence on the part of the audience, began her forty-four pirouettes. At that, Coco Salas turned loose the remaining half of his imprisoned mosquitoes and Halisia whirled like a top. But suddenly, in the midst of that miraculous dancing, there was a terrifying scream that echoed throughout the theater. Coco, thinking that Halisia had been murdered by an infected mosquito, closed up his precious cardboard box. Halisia fell to the floor. But the terrifying scream echoed once more throughout the theater, which meant that nobody paid any attention to Halisia’s fall—all anyone could hear was that howling that seemed to come from the official woods that bordered the theater.

“What the fuck is it
this
time? I can’t believe this!” said Fifo, rising to his feet in the presidential box.

And followed by his entire escort, most of the guests, Halisia herself, and Coco Salas, Fifo went out to the official woods to find out what it was that had inspired the terrible screaming that had interrupted one of the most sublime moments of this special evening.